Also of interest... in dark magic
We Ride Upon Sticks
by Quan Barry (Pantheon, $27)
In Quan Barry’s “surprising and ultimately delightful” debut novel, a girls’ field hockey team in 1989 Danvers, Mass., will apparently do anything to stop losing, said Sarah Neilson in the Minneapolis Star Tribune. The players, in fact, all sign a pledge to serve the underworld, launching themselves on a run toward a state title. Barry, a poet, makes all 11 starters co-protagonists, and this smart, playful tale “treats all of its characters with a love so tender that it’s impossible not to love them, too.”
House of Earth and Blood
by Sarah J. Maas (Bloomsbury, $28)
Sarah Maas’ celebrated worldbuilding skills feel “newly thrilling” in her first work of adult fiction, said Maureen Lee Lenker in EW.com. Maas’ latest fantasy novel, a No. 1 best-seller, imagines a city where humans are subjugated by witches and a halfhuman heroine starts a steamy romance with the assassin she enlists to avenge several murders. For all the rich scene setting, “it’s Maas’ sweeping feel for love stories, and particularly her essential take on female fellowship, that cast the real spell.”
Hurricane Season
by Fernanda Melchor (New Directions, $23)
In Fernanda Melchor’s Mexico, “it takes a village to make and murder a witch,” said Julian Lucas in The New York Times. A woman’s body is found early in Melchor’s acclaimed second novel, which after a folkloric start “flowers into something more richly disturbed.” The victim was thought to be a witch, and Melchor uses her story to distill her country’s culture of sexual violence. Whenever the toxic atmosphere grows too claustrophobic, it “breaks like a fever,” yielding “glints of transcendence.”
The Lucky Star
by William T. Vollmann (Viking, $ 35)
“It is hard to read William Vollmann without feeling both energized and exhausted,” said Scott Bradfield in the Los Angeles Times. The prolific author’s new novel, set in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district, gathers an assortment of oddballs around a woman who’s been cursed by witches to love everyone who loves her. The book often reads “like the longest possible candidate for a Bad Sex in Fiction Award” yet also conveys “a powerful sense of human life and its elemental pleasures.”